Beatrice Leigh at College Part 20

As she read verse after verse, the music of the wonderful lines soothed her restless mood, and the beauty of the thought that love and forgiveness are stronger than selfishness lifted her to a height of joyous exaltation. The idea of Prometheus suffering all agonies for the sake of men came to her like a revelation. While she pondered over it, suddenly like the s.h.i.+ning of a great light she understood the truth of "he that loseth his soul shall find it." The Christ-ideal of self-sacrifice meant the highest self-realization.

"My cup runneth over, my cup runneth over," sang Lucine in her heart, as she read on and on. "I have been blind but now I see. It has been always true, always, always. My cup runneth over. Listen:

"'It doth repent me; words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine, I wish no living thing to suffer pain.'"

"Laura!" Lucine raised her head dreamily. She was unconscious of how the evening hours had drifted past, leaving only a few lingering students here and there in the library. She could not see the two girls bending over the table on the other side of the bookcase behind which she was nestling. But their voices floated mistily to her ears.

"Laura, remember that you have promised to live with my sister next year.

Don't let Lucine coax or frighten you out of it. You have promised."

"But if I don't come back?"

"Well, anyway you have promised to room with Harriet if you do. We'll choose a parlor away off at the other end of the campus from Lucine, so that I can protect you from her demands. You've been growing thinner and whiter all the year. Now, remember. Don't you give in to her selfishness.

She is able to take care of her precious self without killing you in the process. Promise."

Lucine heard a sigh. "I've promised to be her friend and I do care for her dearly; but I want with all my heart to room with Harriet, if I can manage to get back for next year. I'm almost sure I shan't. Now, see here, does this verb come from vinco or vincio? I'm so sleepy I can't read straight."

Lucine very white about the lips was sitting erect in her corner. "My cup runneth over, my cup runneth over," echoed faintly in her brain. "My cup runneth over and Laura likes her best and the essay is up-stairs and I wish no living thing to suffer pain--suffer pain. My cup runneth over.

'Pain, pain ever, forever!' I won't, I won't, I can't do it, I can't, I can't, I can't! To sacrifice it all for her and then--and then to be forsaken!"

Lucine glided from the recess, pa.s.sed swiftly from the library, climbed the stairs to her room, moved toward the drawer which held the essay, and felt for the key in her pocket. It was gone. It must have fallen out while she read, doubled up on the low step. In wild haste now, for the minutes were flying and the board of editors might even now have adjourned, she hurried back to search. The green baize doors swung open in her face, and Berta and Laura came loitering out, their arms around each other, their heads bent close together affectionately.

"Lucine, oh, Lucine!" Laura at sight of her slipped away from Berta, "what is the matter? What has happened? Didn't they accept the essay?"

Brus.h.i.+ng her aside Lucine swept on into the library, turned into the recess, and dropped on her knees beside the step to look for the stray key. Her eyes fell upon the open book which lay face downward where she had forgotten it. Then she remembered. "I wish no living thing to suffer pain."

It was long past ten o'clock and the corridors stretched out their dusky deserted length from one dim gas-jet to another flickering in the shadows, when Lucine crept back to her room. Laura raised a wide-eyed anxious face from the white pillow.

"Lucine, I couldn't sleep until I knew."

The older girl sat down on the bed and drew the little figure close.

"When you are editor, Laura, will you try to like me still? And will you keep on forgiving me and helping--helping me to deserve to have friends?

And will you--will you teach me how to make Harriet like me too?"

"Oh, Lucine!" Laura flung her warm arms around the bowed neck. "I know what we shall do next year, if I can come back. The idea has just struck me. You and Harriet and I shall room together in a firewall with bedrooms for three!"

CHAPTER XII

AN ORIGINAL IN MATH

When Gertrude's brother turned up at college just before the holidays of their senior year, he boldly asked for Bea in the same breath with his sister's name. When the message was brought to her, that fancy-free young person's first thought was a quick dread that Berta would tease her about the preference. But no. Miss Abbott, chairman of the Annual's editorial board, clasped her inky hands in relief.

"Bless the boy! He couldn't have chosen better if he had looked through the walls and discovered Bea the sole student with time to burn--or to talk, for that matter. Trot along, Beatrice, and tell him that Gertrude is coming the moment she has dug her way out of this avalanche of ma.n.u.script. I can't possibly spare her for half an hour yet. Go and distract his mind from his unnatural sister by means of another story."

"Tell him about your little original in math, Bea," called Lila after her, "that's your best and latest."

Bea retraced her steps to thrust back an injured countenance at the door.

"I guess I am able to converse as well as monologue, can't I?" she demanded indignantly, "you just listen."

However, when confronted by a young man with a monosyllabic tongue and an embarra.s.singly eloquent pair of eyes, she seized a copy of the last Annual from the table in the senior parlor, and plunged into an account of her own editorial trials.

Gertrude is on the board for this year's Annual, you know, and Berta Abbott is chairman. At this very moment they are struggling over a deluge of ma.n.u.scripts submitted in their prize poem contest. Of course, I sympathize, because I have been through something of the same ordeal. The Monthly offered a prize for a short story last fall, and we had rather a lively sequel to the decision. Shall I tell you about it from the beginning? At our special meeting, I read the stories aloud, because I happen to be chief editor. n.o.body said anything at first. Janet, the business editor, tipped her chair back and stared at the piles of magazines on the shelves opposite. Laura, who does the locals, pressed her forehead closer to the pane to watch the girls hurrying past on their way to the tennis tournament on the campus. Adele and Jo, the literaries, nibbled their fountain-pens.

I spread out the ma.n.u.scripts, side by side, in a double row on the big sanctum desk, picked up my scribbled pad, leaned back till the swivel screw squeaked protestingly from below, and said, "Well?"

Janet brought her chair down on all four feet with a b.u.mp. "Nary one is worth a ten dollar prize," she declared pugnaciously, "especially now that Robbie Belle has gone to the infirmary for six weeks and she can't help me in soliciting advertis.e.m.e.nts."

Laura turned her head. "Robbie Belle had promised to write up the first hall play for me. She was going to review two books for Jo and compose a Christmas poem for Adele's department. I think maybe there are perhaps a dozen or so girls who might have been more easily spared."

I brushed a hand across my weary brow. It did not feel like cobwebs exactly,--more like cork, sort of light and dry and full of holes. I had been up almost all night, studying over those fifteen ma.n.u.scripts, applying the principles of criticism, weighing, balancing, measuring, arguing with myself, and rebelling against fate. If Robbie Belle had been there she could have recognized the best story by instinct. Ever since I became chief editor I had depended upon her judgment, because she is a born critic and always right, and I'm not. And now just when I needed her most of all and more than anybody else, there she had to go and get quarantined in the infirmary.

"Girls," I said, "do express an opinion. Say what you think. We simply must decide this matter now, because the prize story has to go to press before the first, and this is our only free afternoon. I know what I think--at least I am almost sure what I think--but I want to hear your views first. Adele, you're always conscientious."

Adele was only a junior and rather new to the responsibility of being on the editorial board. She glanced down at her page of notes.

"Every one of the stories has some good points," she began cautiously.

"Most of them start out well and several finish well. Six have good plots, nine are interesting, five are brightly written. Number seven is, I believe--yes, I think I consider it the best. The trouble is----"

"Altogether too jerky," interrupted Jo, "a fine plot but no style whatever. This is a cat. See the cat catch the rat. That's the kind of English in number seven. Now I vote for number fifteen."

"Oh, but, Jo," I broke in eagerly, for number seven was my own laborious choice also, and Adele's corroboration strengthened me wonderfully. "Jo, it is the simplicity of the style that is its greatest recommendation.

You know how Professor Whitcomb has drummed into us the beauty of Anglo-Saxon diction. It's beautiful--it's charming--it's perfect. Why, a six-year-old could understand it. Fifteen is far too sensational for good art. Just listen to this----"

Jo was stubborn. "The use of short words is a mere fad," she said, "it is like wearing dimity for every occasion. Now listen to this!"

She s.n.a.t.c.hed up one ma.n.u.script and read aloud while I declaimed from the other. Adele listened with a pained frown on her forehead, Janet laughed and teetered recklessly to and fro on her frisky chair, Laura fidgeted at the window and filled every pause with a threat to leave us instanter for the tournament positively had to be written up that day. Finally I put the question to the vote, for Jo is so decided in her manner that she makes me feel wobbly unless I am conscious of being backed up by Robbie Belle. I suppose it is because my own opinions are so shaky from the inside view that I hate to appear variable from the outside. It would have been horrid to yield to Jo's arguments and change my ideas right there before the whole board. The rest of them except Jo had fallen into a way of deferring to my judgment, for I had seemed to hit it off right almost always in accepting or rejecting contributions. n.o.body knew how much I had depended on Robbie Belle.

The board awarded the prize to number seven, my choice, you know. Janet was on my side because the story had a nice lively plot, and that was all she cared about. Laura put in a blank ballot, saying that her head ached so that it was not fair to either side for her to cast any weight upon the scale. Adele of course voted with me. Jo stuck to number fifteen till the end.

"Well, that's over!" sighed Laura and escaped before any one had put the motion to adjourn. Janet vanished behind her, and Jo picked up the ma.n.u.script of which she was champion.

"By the way, girls," she said, "I will return this to its writer, if you don't mind. And I shall tell her to offer it to the Annual. The committee will jump at the chance. Find out who she is, please."

I slipped the elastic band from the packet of fifteen sealed envelopes and selected the one marked with the t.i.tle of the story. The name inside was that of a soph.o.m.ore who had already contributed several articles to the Monthly. Then I opened the envelope belonging to number seven.

"Maria Mitch.e.l.l Kiewit," I read, "who in the world is she? I've never heard of her. She must be a freshman."

Jo who was half way out of the room stopped at the word and thrust her head back around the door. "Did little Maria Kiewit write that? No wonder it is simple and jerky. She's a mathematical prodigy, she is. Her mother is an alumna of this college. See! The infant was named after our great professor of astronomy. She wants to specialize herself in mathematical astronomy when she gets to be a junior. Her mother was head editor of the Monthly in her day. Maria rooms somewhere in this corridor, I believe. It will be a big thing for her to win the prize away from all the upper cla.s.s girls. I didn't vote for her. By-bye."

"Oh!" exclaimed Adele, clasping her hands in that intense way of hers, "won't she be happy when she hears! A little ignorant unknown freshman to win the prize for the best short story among eight hundred students! Her mother will be delighted. Her mother will be proud."

"Hist!" Jo's head reappeared. "She's coming down the corridor now. Red cheeks, bright eyes, ordinary nose, round chin, long braid, white s.h.i.+rtwaist, tan skirt--nothing but an average freshman. She doesn't look like a mathematical prodigy, but she is one. And an author, too--dear, dear! There must be some mistake. Authors never have curly hair."